On Earth, however, we are constantly surrounded by low, nondangerous levels of radioactivity coming from trace elements – mainly uranium and thorium – in the environment, as well as cosmic rays from space. Over the past 30 years, scientists have developed an experimental program to try to detect the rare interactions between WIMPs and regular atoms. NASA/ESA/A Feild STSci, CC BY Searching for WIMPs An artist’s rendition of the halo of dark matter surrounding the central spiral disk of the Milky Way. WIMPs in the Milky Way theoretically fly through us on Earth all the time, but because they interact weakly, they just don’t hit anything. “WIMP” captures the particle’s essence quite nicely – it has mass, meaning it interacts gravitationally, but it otherwise interacts very weakly – or rarely – with normal matter. One popular guess is that dark matter is a new type of particle, the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, or WIMP. I’m a physicist interested in understanding the nature of dark matter. As the solar system orbits around the center of the Milky Way, Earth moves through a dark matter halo, which makes up most of the matter in our galaxy. In the typical model, dark matter accounts for most of the gravitational attraction in the universe, providing the glue that allows structures like galaxies, including our own Milky Way, to form. Physicists like me don’t fully understand what makes up about 83% of the matter of the universe - something we call “ dark matter.” But with a tank full of xenon buried nearly a mile under South Dakota, we might one day be able to measure what dark matter really is. The LZ is a super sensitive machine that may one day detect a dark matter particle.
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